Bernie Sanders Is Currently Winning the Democratic Primary Race, and I’ll Prove It to You

Seth Abramson Assistant
Professor of English at University of New Hampshire; Series Co-Editor, Best
American Experimental Writing

Nobody cares how well a
politician does at the ballot box when he or she is running for an office
unopposed. What matters is how a politician performs in contested primaries and
general elections, as when it really matters — like it will, for instance, this
November — you can be certain of a contested election.

With that said, let’s make an
important observation: Bernie Sanders has tied or beaten Hillary Clinton in a
majority of the actively contested votes this election season.

You doubt it? Okay, let me
explain.

Bernie Sanders has terrible
name recognition in states where he hasn’t advertised or campaigned yet;
meanwhile, Hillary Clinton has universal name recognition everywhere. Realizing
this, the Clinton camp pushed hard to rack up the early vote in every state
where early voting was an option. They did this not primarily for the reason
we’ve been told — because Clinton performs well among older voters, and older
voters are more likely to vote early than other age demographics — but rather
because they knew that early votes are almost always cast before the election season
actually begins in a given state.

That’s right — in each state,
most of the early primary voting occurs before the candidates have aired any
commercials or held any campaign events. For Bernie Sanders, this means that
early voting happens, pretty much everywhere, before anyone knows who he is.
Certainly, early voting occurs in each state before voters have developed a
sufficient level of familiarity and comfort with Sanders to vote for him.

But on Election Day — among
voters who’ve been present and attentive for each candidate’s commercials,
local news coverage, and live events — Sanders tends to tie or beat Clinton.

In fact, that’s the real
reason Sanders does well in caucuses.

It’s not because caucuses
“require a real time investment,” as the media likes to euphemistically say,
but because caucuses require that you vote on Election Day rather than well
before it.

Consider: in North Carolina,
Hillary Clinton only won Election Day voting 52% to 48%. Given the shenanigans
in evidence during the live voting there — thousands of college students were
turned away from the polls due to insufficient identification under a new
voter-suppression statute in the state — it wouldn’t be unfair to call that
4-point race more like a 2-point one (51% to 49% for Clinton).

Consider: on Super Tuesday 3,
because early voting is always reported first, Clinton’s margins of victory
were originally believed to be 25 points in Missouri, 30 points in Illinois,
and 30 points in Ohio. Missouri, which doesn’t have conventional early voting,
ended up a tie. Illinois ended up with a 1.8% margin for Clinton (after being a
42-point race in Clinton’s favor just a week earlier) and Ohio a 13.8% margin.

Any one of us could do the
math there. And yet the media never did.

Consider: in Arizona
yesterday, the election was called almost immediately by the media, with
Clinton appearing to “win” the state by a margin of 61.5% to 36.1%. Of course,
this was all early voting. CNN even wrongly reported that these early votes
constituted the live vote in 41% of all Arizona precincts — rather than merely
mail-in votes constituting a percentage of the total projected vote in the
state — which allowed most Americans to go to bed believing both that Clinton
had won Arizona by more than 25 points and that that margin was the result of
nearly half of Arizona’s precincts reporting their live-voting results. Neither
was true.

In fact, as of the time of
that 61.5% to 36.1% “win,” not a single precinct in Arizona had reported its
Election Day results.

Indeed, more than two and a
half hours after polls closed in Arizona, officials there had counted only
54,000 of the estimated 431,000 Election Day ballots.

That’s about 12%.

So how did Bernie Sanders do
on Election Day in Arizona?

As of the writing of this
essay (2:45 AM ET), Sanders was leading Clinton in Election Day voting in
Arizona 50.2% to 49.8%, with just under 75,000 votes (about 17.3% of all
Election Day votes) counted.

So imagine, for a moment, that
early votes were reported to the media last rather than first. Which, of
course, they quite easily could be, given that they’re less — rather than more
— reflective of the actual state of opinion on Election Day. Were early votes
reported last rather than first, Arizona as of 2:45 AM ET would have been
considered not only too close to call but a genuine nail-biter. In fact, only
400 or so Election Day votes were separating the two Democratic candidates at
that point — though the momentum with each new vote counted was quite clearly
in Sanders’ favor.

So the question becomes, why
does any of this matter? Does the point being made here — that Bernie Sanders
is as or more popular than Hillary in both all the states he won and many of
the states he didn’t — gain Sanders a single delegate? Does it move him one
inch closer to being President?

No.

What it does do is explain why
the Clinton-Sanders race is a 5-point race nationally — just a hair from being
a statistical tie, given the margin of error — despite the media treating
Clinton’s nomination as a foregone conclusion.

What it does do is explain how
Clinton is “beating” Sanders among American voters despite having a -13
favorability rating nationally, as compared to Sanders’ +11 rating. That
dramatic difference is possible because in favorability polling, pollsters only
count voters who say they know enough about a candidate to form an opinion.
That eliminates the sort of “early voters” who cast ballots for Hillary Clinton
before having much of a handle on who Bernie Sanders is.

And what it does do is explain
why Sanders outperforms Clinton against Donald Trump in nearly every state
where head-to-head general-election polling data is available. While some of
this is undoubtedly due to the fact that Sanders beats Clinton by between 30
and 40 points among Independents — itself a major warning sign for a Clinton
candidacy this fall — the rest is explained by the fact that when voters come
to know Bernie Sanders as well as they already know Hillary Clinton and Donald
Trump, they tend to prefer him to these two by clear margins.

The Hillary camp, and Hillary
supporters, are justly excited about how their candidate is performing in the
delegate horse-race. The problem is that that excitement is quickly becoming
the sort of arrogance that will in fact endanger Hillary’s candidacy for
President. Both she and her team — including all her millions of supporters —
should consider the fact that Hillary does not, outside the deep-red Deep
South, do particularly well among voters when they’re given any other
reasonable alternative. The fact that early voting statutes and media reporting
of elections in America favors the maintenance of the illusion that Hillary
remains popular when voters become familiar with other credible options does
not excuse ignorance of the reality; certainly, it won’t help Democrats in
November.

And given that a demagogue
like Donald Trump is the likely Republican nominee, that’s a scary thought for
many Americans. Sanders voters should want — and most do want — a Clinton
campaign that understands its weaknesses sufficiently to ameliorate them in a
general election, should Clinton be the Democratic nominee. Right now that’s
clearly not happening, and the national media is unfortunately enabling the
persistence and expansion of these troubling blind-spots.

Finally, we’d be remiss if we
didn’t talk about super-delegates. These are folks who are supposed to be
supporting whichever candidate has the best chance of winning in November. We
already know, per head-to-head general-election polling, that the better
candidate to run against Donald Trump is Bernie Sanders; however, many
super-delegates (and most of the media) dismiss general election polling this
early on, even though Sanders’ commanding lead over Trump is clearly
statistically relevant. (This is especially true given that his name
recognition lags well behind Trump’s.)

But what about the argument,
implicitly being made to super-delegates now, and likely to be made to them
explicitly in Philadelphia this summer, that Bernie Sanders has, broadly
speaking, out-performed Hillary Clinton in Election Day voting? Given that
Election Day voting in the spring is the very same sort of high-information
voting that will occur in November, you’d think super-delegates would be quite
interested to know that, in live voting, Bernie Sanders beats Hillary Clinton
more often than not.

Seth Abramson is the Series
Editor for Best American Experimental Writing (Wesleyan University) and the
author, most recently, of DATA (BlazeVOX, 2016).